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20.6.17

unlike - opinion

Most men I know enjoy their entitlement and engage in gaslighting in order to silence anyone who speaks about the ways patriarchy negatively impacts women and girls. This is how the society gets to pretend that sexim, just like racism, "doesn't exist".

I have decided to purge those men from my life, and one of the places where this is as easy as a click of a button is online. All these men sound the same, cult members defending the dogma with the same illogical arguments, and invariably, they all think they deserve my time, because they have crucial information about this issue that I haven't heard before. This is the essence of male entitlement to female time and care. No more.

I removed another male acquaintance from my friends on an online art forum today. That's second so far this year, and I can't say that I'm not disappointed. It would be nice, just for once, for a man to be respectful of women's suffering. But I'm done with turning a blind eye because the old adage of "seaparate the art from the artist" only works in favour of male chauvinists, and by not saying anything, I'm only playing along.

In patriarchy, it's imperative to get rid of female point of view. And art is the purest, most intimate and powerful point of view that can be instantly communicated. This makes art particularly dangerous to oppressive structures such as the patriarchy. The system is already designed to prop up men and suppress women, this is how you get a shit-ton of male-directed violent movies coming out of Hollywood, while female directors who get money for projects are rarer than pandas, despite near 1:1 male to female ratio of director school graduates. Same can be said for any position of power,

politics, lead acting, and sadly - the art world. And the way these mediocre men, who are in the majority in the upper echelons of all fields, continue to earn money is that people are expected to turn a blind eye to their misogyny. If they don't they are accused of all sorts of things by other men. But why should we sabotage liberation of women for art that is almost never unmissable? Except for maybe Degas, who I was devastated to learn was a misogynistic pig of a man who considered women animals.

Patriarchy ensures that men are held to increasingly lower standards. We now have a situation where most men, fathers, brothers, sons, leaders of state, surgeons, bankers, teachers, etc, are masturbating to paid rape daily in front of their computers, like some addicted apes, sapping their strength and wasting their intellectual capacity, and then they go to work to fuck us all, the rest of the humanity, the environment, the peace in the world, and when they rape, they go unpunished while victims who dare to speak up get crucified, either by society or in our courtrooms. Men can lie and destroy with impunity because women's point of view, and voices, are made irrelevant, and this is played out on a micro scale, in conversations and jokes and personal relationships as a reminder.

I could make a long list of all the famous men, as well as men I got to know in person, who disappointed me with their chauvinism. Suffice it to say that the overwhelming majority can be expected to turn into a mansplaining, gaslighting asshole the moment patriarchy or damaging beauty standards or inequality between the sexes is mentioned. So I decided to speak up whenever I see it, and at least make it impossible for them to go through life unchallenged.